Effective teamwork and group communication are essential for your professional and personal success. In this course you will learn to: make better decisions, be more creative and innovative, manage conflict and work with difficult group members, negotiate for preferred outcomes, improve group communication in virtual environments, develop a better overall understanding of human interaction, and work more effectively as a team. Our goal is to help you understand these important dynamics of group communication and learn how to put them into practice to improve your overall teamwork.

From the lesson

Module 1

Module 1 is all about communication. But not the common sense or taken-for-granted notions of communication you might expect. Instead, we’re going to rethink communication and challenge some of the conventional wisdom about communication that is common in our society. We’ll compare and contrast different theories or models of communication, and see if we can develop a more sophisticated understanding of communication to understand the complexities of human interaction in today’s groups. We’ll also explore some of the hidden forces of group communication, like context, systems and institutions, and design. These are all things that are “present” in any group situation, influencing how we interact with each other, but easy to miss if we’re not looking. We want to expand our field of vision, so to speak, so we have a fuller understanding of what’s happening in any group situation.